How to Setup Shopify Store for your FBA Business

Diversification is something every seller should aim for. Amazon is very lucrative, but for risk management you don’t want to rely 100% on Amazon as your only sales channel. Ideally you want to have multiple sales channels, so in case 1 of them declines you will still have others to rely on. The easiest sales channel you can setup yourself is running your own webshop.

Top 3 reasons every Amazon Seller needs their own Online Ecommerce Store

You don’t have to pay Amazon 15% commission.Pretty obvious one, but this is major! Margins through your own store are right away 15% higher than on Amazon!

You have full control over your customers & sales channel.
This is a very important one. Your rankings on Amazon will always fluctuate. You might rank on page #1 right now for your Garlic Press. But maybe next year the competition has pushed you down to page #2 and you are barely doing sales anymore. But with your own store you will always be the only seller!

You can build an email list & create a customer base.Amazon does not allow you to email your customers for promotional purposes. Meaning if you have are launching a second product on Amazon you can’t even e-mail your previous customers to let them know you will be launching a second awesome product! But with your own webshop you can create your own email-list of which you will have full control!

Most FBA sellers start with their own Shopify webstore as it is very easy to setup & connect to your stock at the FBA warehouse.

1). Register Domain Name

If you have not this already you should start by register your domain name for your webshop. Most obvious would be to just pick your brandname.com. If this domain is already registered you can always pick something like: brandname-store.com or brandname-online.com. I use namecheap.com to register my domains.

2). Setup Shopify Store

Shopify has a 14 day free trial. After that you that you pick one of their plans:

3). Connect Domain with Shopify Store

By default your Shopify store will use brandname.myshopify.com as URL. Of course we want to use our own domain name.

Next we click on “Connect existing domain”.

Here we enter our own domain name that we want to connect with Shopify.

Now we need to login back in our domain name provider. Here we have to change:

A record should point to Shopify’s IP address, which is 23.227.38.32

CNAME record should point to shops.myshopify.com

How this is done differs per domain provider. If you are having trouble with this I advice you to contact your domain provider or read Shopify’s help page.

Once that is done you will need to verify that everything is working, and you are all set.

3). Connect Shopify to Amazon FBA

We have to ask ourself: How are we going to ship the orders we receive through our Shopify store? Most of us are already using Amazon FBA, and I personally love it. So I will be connecting my Shopify store with Amazon FBA. This way each order from Shopify will be send from my FBA stock.

Now on your product page you can select Amazon Marketplace Web as your fulfillment service.

4). Import Amazon products to Shopify

Import products from Amazon. Of course we can manually add all our Amazon product into our Shopify store. However, I am rather lazy so I want to automatically import all my Amazon products into my Shopify store. There are a couple ways to do this:

You can create a .CSV file from your Amazon inventory & import it in your Shopify Store:

Use one of Shopify’s 3rd party apps: I use this one which has the 7 day free trial.

5). Promote Shopify store

Ok, now that our Shopify store is up and running we want to start with promotion! People aren’t just randomly going to find your e-commerce story so are going to do some advertising:

Amazon

Amazon has very strict rules about directing Amazon customers to your own site: This is forbidden! However, you are allowed to have your website on your product packaging. So I always make sure to add my Shopify URL to the back of the product packaging.

SEO

Traffic from Google will be our main source of visitors. We definitely want to be found if customers Google our brand name. But if we are selling Garlic Presses we also want to be found for the keyword: “Garlic Press” and other long tail keywords.

I have been into SEO since 2013 and used to do all SEO work myself. However, the last couple of years I noticed the world of SEO is changing so fast that you really have to be on top of your SEO game. So therefore I rather outsource all my SEO needs to a freelancer who does it full time. This way I can fully focus on my main strength: Selling on Amazon. And have a professional take care of the SEO side of the webshop.

SEO Service

I personally have tried a couple of different SEO service’s and ended up with: TheHoth.com. So far I am pretty happy with their service, they have a clean dashboard and their quality backlinks are top notch. They offer a whole bunch of SEO services: content creation, guest posting, high quality backlinks, reputation management etc. We definitely don’t need all of these services. I only use them for the following:

Contextual Backlinks: Google favours backlinks that come from website that have the same content. So if I have my Garlic Press Shopify store, these backlinks will come from food related blogs.

High Authority backlinks: The powerhouse behind the backlinks strategy. Since my ecommerce store is brand new I want to give it some authority. This can be done with backlinks from other high authority websites.

Content creation: On the Shopify site I also have a blog. I want to have as much content on this blog about my products as possible. This is a great way to rank for long tail keywords. For example: If someone searched for: “stainless steel garlic press with silicone grip”, and I happen to have that keyword somewhere on my blog, it is very likely that my blog will show up for that long tail keyword.

Regardless of the fees I say having your own ecommerce store that you control 100% is a great idea. Couple that with a strong email list then you have a good fall back in case something goes wrong with your Amazon listing.

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About me

Hi, I am 27 years old. I have been doing Amazon FBA for about 3 years, of which 2 years full-time. In these years I made a lot of mistakes. I will share what I learned on this blog so you won't have to make the same mistakes ;)